One of the big winners of the Baltimore Ravens offseason was Lamar Jackson. He got plenty of new weapons to work with, and he saw a huge payday. One of the quiet losers from the after-effects may end up being Mark Andrews.
Is Baltimore Ravens TE Mark Andrews a sell in fantasy football
Nobody is saying that the Baltimore Ravens are going to phase Andrews out of the offense, but over the past couple of years, the offense has run straight through him. In 2020, it was just Andrews and Hollywood Brown, with Willie Snead as the only option. Needless to say, they have better competition.
In 2021 the Ravens targeted Andrews 26.6% of the time, and that is with Hollywood Brown as the only other option. The third option was half of a season from rookie Rashod Bateman and half of a season from Sammy Watkins.
Then, last season, his only real target competition was Demarcus Robinson. He finished with a 29% target rate.
When Bateman is healthy, his target rate has been closer to 20%. The last time Beckham was on a field, his target rate was 17%, although that is the low end with the Rams, and every other season was over 20%. Then, while we do not know Zay Flowers' historical target rate we do know a first-round pick will be involved.
Last season Jahan Dotson was selected in a similar range. He was banged up at times and was behind Terry McLaurin, but he was at 15% of his target rate.
Then you add in Isaiah Likely, Charlie Kolar, Devin Duvernay, and the running backs. The reality is that there just is not going to be enough for one player to get 25% of the targets.
ESPN has Andrews projected to dip down to a 22% target rate which would be the lowest since his rookie season. However, fantasy managers may feel better about Andrews because of the volume of targets.
ESPN also has Jackson projected for 439 attempts, which would be a career-high by nearly three passes per game. It would make sense that the Ravens would pass more with more wide-receiver options. Beyond that, when they moved from Greg Roman to Todd Monken they added a much more vertical passing game coordinator into the mix.
So, Andrews may see his overall share of the work go down. However, the overall volume may be going up, and the efficiency may increase as well for more yards and touchdowns per target. If that is the case we may not see a rise or fall, but instead get similar results.